The first day after the end of the NFL regular season has come to be called Black Monday — when many a team with a losing record generally fires its coach. This suits the urges of the owner who has promised a winner to the fans, though he didn’t produce players who can win. Blame the coach.…
They are so profuse as to encircle the globe, so lethal that even mutual enemies agree they must be monitored and limited. If you are thinking the “they” refers to firearms, you aren’t thinking the way some policymakers are. No, we speak of a threat that draws undivided attention: the matter of…
When I was 10 I had a yo-yo. It was blue with marbled streaks of silver. At school we weren’t supposed to have yo-yos. But what’s the point of a yo-yo if one can’t show it off? So I empathized with those who came to the Texas Capitol on New Year’s Day with fancy toys…
If Tornado Alley were a battlefield, historically this time of year the cannons would be silenced. Not so this December. All hell has broken loose. The weather map has been a work by Jackson Pollock: all splatters. It’s impossible to cite a cause for such weirdness across a swath of Dixie, including killer tornadoes in…
Everyone knows the adjective form of “good”: Good tidings. Good cheer. Good grief. But there’s the noun form, too: The condition of good or goodness. The common good. The greater good. So we ask today: Is government any good? To be honest, that’s a silly question, considering the schools and roads it enables, the old-age…
Charles Barkley calls Twitter “a place where fools go to feel important.” He’s talking about you, Donald. You’ve built a fool’s paradise, constructed in planks of 140 words or less. Like many who find that kind of fame salutary, your ambitions are destined to go no further than…
The arrival of the Beatles. The Civil Rights Act. LBJ’s rout of Goldwater. All vied for “Biggest Story” of 1964. But another might have eclipsed them all: the Surgeon General’s report definitively linking smoking with cancer. Why so big? Well, that year four of 10 American adults smoked. Yes, this cancer thing was big news.…
You bet it was political. Moments after it happened, we were all certain. That was in 1995 when Timothy McVeigh’s fertilizer bomb made rubble of the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168. You bet it was political as well last week when a wide-eyed, white-bearded Obama-hater was charged with the deaths of…
I was minding my own and humanity’s business on the Internet when I checked my Gmail and found the most horrifying thing. “Sensational sweet potatoes,” said the email. Why did I click on its contents? I probably shouldn’t have. The fact is that my gamble was made in the purest pursuit of…
“I should have learned sushi.” So says James in a rare moment of retrospection. Most days he has no time for that. He is all forward motion. His goal is to be an architect. Now he’s working in food service and mastering English. A sushi chef makes more than what James does at the moment.…